Looking back at the year that was 2022 now three months into 2023 feels somewhat akin to returning home after going on holiday for a few weeks. Nothing has really changed. Everything is right where they had been prior to departing. A review of the “creative resolutions” made in the 2021 Year In Review is all one needs to corroborate this fact. 1) A refresh of the design, something I’ve been thinking about since 2019. There have been no improvements to the site’s design, not even a fresh coat of paint. The backend platform which allowed the current site to remain live at the same time changes were being made on a “test” site mandated an upgrade in current services at a substantial increase to current costs. All things considered, a design refresh is still possible without the upgrade, but that would mean taking the site offline while changes are being made. Therefore, in order to prevent an extended downtime of the site, a significant time investment needs to be dedicated to the redesign work; …

Instead of publishing a year-in-review article at the outset of 2021, I wrote an article compiling together information which had gone neglected over the previous year, but were still worthy of attention. My workload in 2020 necessitated putting Indievisual on the back burner so often the article was warranted. The only interview published then was for Nakano Ryota which has now graced the “Latest Interview” splash at the top of the site for two years! Unfortunately, with 2021 being similarly busy (a little less than 2020) no new interviews were published last year though one had been scheduled before the director had to cancel for personal reasons. I still do hope to interview this director sometime in the future. I did, however, manage speak with director Nakanishi Mai and write a feature about her experience shooting her latest horror short movie, Swallow. Ms. Nakanishi’s ability to speak English negated the necessity to translate our dialogue thus allowing for a quick production of the article which went live in October. 2021 was also the year I broke …

The third full year of Indievisual brought much improvement in many areas and exciting developments personally for my writing career. No longer bound to comic book work, my first full year of being a dedicated film translator and writer was quite exciting. Though paid work still took precedence over this side project, with my comic career behind me I no longer had to make the mental switch from being visually creative to clearly communicating through language and vocabulary; writing is more right-brained than one might think. The ability to focus specifically on the research and practice of composing articles meant content on Indievisual took a qualitative step forward though in terms of specific figures the results for 2019 were mixed overall. Interviews Only a single interview was published last year, a further drop from the two in 2018. However, there were mitigating circumstances. In addition to my own work schedule, scheduling a follow-up with Yamamoto Hyoe (pictured above) took up quite a bit of time. A busy filmmaker working on a new documentary with changing …

Indievisual’s first full calendar year (it went live in April of 2017 with a Year-in-Review posted 8 months later) set new milestones and solidly built upon the momentum of its launch. The number of interviews published approached a respectable pace of one every two months. Caught My Eye write-ups also saw an increase following the new guiding principle for how they would be written as detailed in this blog entry. And with some good fortune, the number of Side Stories remained unchanged. 2018 was a landmark year for writing articles and interviewing filmmakers. Or…that is what could have been written. Sadly, the reality is quite different. 2018 was a good year certainly for paid work with many opportunities received from long time collaborators. This was also the first year translation work needed to be juggled with a job in the other realm in which I have a foot still planted. For more on this, please follow this link as I do not wish to dedicate space for it here. Suffice it to say, simultaneously working …

Indievisual went live in April of 2017. It’s been ten months since then and the journey has been amazing. Revisiting filmmakers interviewed, features written, and movies introduced, I look back at a year of learning to crawl before I walk.